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Learning Mathematics | Algebrica

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In the summer of 1999 I enrolled in computer engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza. I had spent the five years of secondary school at a modest provincial school specialising in the classics, and the collision with that new world came as a shock. Mathematics has always been one of my favourite subjects, not because I had any particular gift for it, simply because it drew me more than Greek and Latin, more than biology and art history. Still, knowing that what I had learned up to that point fell short of the threshold required for a degree that was anything but easy left me disheartened. I had no idea that sequences and numerical series existed. I had never solved an integral. I had only heard of them in my last year of school, from the cousin of a classmate of mine who was studying computer engineering at the same university I would later enrol in, and the way he described them made them sound like hostile things. I knew complex numbers by reputation alone, essentially throu

A suitcase full of rags In the summer of 1999 I enrolled in computer engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza. I had spent the five years of secondary school at a modest provincial school specialising in the classics, and the collision with that new world came as a shock. Mathematics has always been one of my favourite subjects, not because I had any particular gift for it, simply because it drew me more than Greek and Latin, more than biology and art history. Still, knowing that what I had learned up to that point fell short of the threshold required for a degree that was…

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